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Today the LA City Council voted for a new city minimum wage of $15 an hour. But organized labor had asked for an exception for union workers, who could be paid less. What was behind this terrible proposal? HAROLD MEYERSON will comment; he writes for the Washington Post, the American Prospect, and the LA Times op-ed page.
Also: Banned in Abu Dhabi: ANDREW ROSS advocated rights for workers there, who are building a new Guggenheim museum and an NYU campus. He teaches at NYU, and will tell the story of how the United Arab Emirates barred him from entry.
Plus “Ready—and excited—for Hillary”: KATHA POLLITT, explains why: it’s because “Clinton is running as a feminist–and that matters for all women.”
Katha is a poet, essayist and columnist for The Nation; her most recent book is PRO: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.
Instead of prosecuting Edward Snowden under the Espionage Act, Congress and the president should be saying Thank you. Without him, Congress would never have ended the NSA’s bulk phone data collection. I
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Also: Only one senator voted against the Patriot Act after 9/11; yesterday, 76 Senators voted to repeal the NSA’s collection of cell phone data on all Americans, and President Obama signed the bill. Thank you EDWARD SNOWDEN, for revealing what the NSA was doing. We’ll have comment from LIZA GOITEIN—she’s co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Do the police have a privacy right to withhold video shot by in-car cameras or body cams? Do public officials, acting in their public capacity, have a right to prevent the public from reviewing video evidence of their conduct? You’d think the answer was obviously “no.” When the police kill somebody, it’s not “private.” . . . continued at TheNation.com, 
Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who died on April 10 at age 69, is best known here for his 202 antique street lamps in front of LACMA—they’ve become an icon of the city—but one of his most fascinating and misunderstood works is The Other Vietnam Memorial– 3 million Vietnamese names etched into a dozen gigantic copper plates that stand 13 feet high.
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It’s a simple distinction, but somehow it’s been overlooked by a lot of those who support the decision by PEN to give its “Freedom of Expression” award to Charlie Hebdo. Those who signed the protest against the award (I was one of them) agree that Charlie Hebdo had a right to publish cartoons about Islam, no matter how disgusting, and not be killed for doing it. The question is whether Charlie Hebdo should be given an award for publishing them.
The ACLU in California today released a free smart-phone app that allows people to send cellphone videos of police encounters to the ACLU, automatically—and the ACLU will preserve the video footage, even if the cops seize the phone and delete the video or destroy the phone. The app, “Mobile Justice CA,” works for both iPhones and Android users. It’s available at 
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Also: In
Plus: Voting rights, the proper response to terrorism, the relationship between political and economic democracy —these are questions Americans confronted 150 years ago when the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began. ERIC FONER will comment—his most recent book is Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.